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" those who fail to reread
are obliged to read the same story everywhere”
-- Roland Barthes, S/Z (1974, p.16)
Freedom and Constraint in Human Action
We feel especially privileged to write in honor of Vladimir Petrovich’s 80 th birthday. It is
indeed a great day for celebration of an exemplary life in science and as a public intellectual of
international scope.
This opportunity has induced us to reflect upon our long and unusually deep association
with Vladimir Petrovich. We are, so to speak, kin to Vladimir Petrovich, his close friend, Vasilii
Davydov, and many of the Russian followers of cultural-historical and activity theory. We share
with them, and with others of generation, the honor of being “third generation” Vygotskians.
We, like them, studied with A.R. Luria and A.N. Leontiev. We attended lectures and visited with
other key scholars of that generation: Bozhovich, Levina, Morozova, Zaporozhets, Elkonin,
Galperin, Zeigarnik, and others. We shared with them too, in greatly attenuated form,
experience of life in the Soviet Union during and after the Cold War. As officially chosen
representatives of American science, we were not subject to the same, draconian, punishments
for fraternization that Vladimir Petrovich and Vasilii Vasilevich, not to mention the older
generation of Soviet citizens, had to endure. But as Americans in Moscow during the Cold War,
one of the costs of such friendship was to subordinate oneself to the local constraints as the
most elementary condition of friendship. One might be able to bend the rules ever so slightly,
but if you happened over a surveillance trip wire, the consequences were extraordinarily
unpleasant for all concerned. Such relations, maintained across time and radically changed
global circumstances bespeak one of the great lessons we learned from our Russian friends and
teachers -- the meaning of friendship.
At the same time, the two of us had professional relations in which we played the roles
of “science mediators” - as translators, exchange officials, journal and book editors. And, as will
happen in the case of such mediators, we have also been willing appropriators of the ideas of
Vygotsky and his descendents, whatever the particular kinship relation they claim to each
other.
We have also had several decades of experience seeking to explain Russian and
American colleagues to each other. That can be an odd experience. For example, our American
colleagues often have found us difficult to understand, methodologically anomalous,
sometimes over-literary or oddly focused on notions such as cultural mediation, polyphony and
development. Simultaneously our Russian colleagues often see us as people who have mis-
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appropriated those very same ideas, or as people who have failed to understand the
fundamental ideas and the intellectual relationships among key figures including, Vygotksy,
Leontiev, Luria, Rubinsthein, and so on. In short, the American Vygotsky often seems to bear
little relationship to the Russian Vygotsky.
The two of us are clearly caught in the middle of these kinds of cross-cutting discussions
in international scientific discourse surrounding the ideas of Vygotsky and those who claim
kinship with him. Consequently, what we offer here is ineluctably going to be, itself, internally
dialogic and polyphonic. Vladimir Petrovich, we hope, would approve of this approach to his
work.
Finding a Common Thread
Because Vladimir Petrovich has lived through such different sociopolitical contexts and
has covered such a wide range of topics, we immediately confronted when we began to write
this essay, the need to address the problem of what aspect of his work to focus on. The
development of perceptual actions and problem solving in small children? The study of eye
movements and problem solving among children and adults? The ergonomics of motor control
for improving worker performance in highly technical jobs? The nature of human culture and
human spirituality expressed in art?
Following the well known maxim that “to understand behavior we need to understand
the history of behavior” we began to re-read Vladimir Petrovich’s work. This re-reading began
with recent articles on what he refers to as Vygotsky’s “non-classical psychology.” From there
we began to retrace this recent, general, formulation of his ideas, starting with the early
publications of the late 1950’s and 1960s, when he was working with his mentor, Alexander
Zaporozhets. We expected that we would find a common thread within the tangled jargon of
each of the specific discourses. And we did. That thread is the study of action as the ideal unit
of analysis for understanding the possibilities and limits of human freedom.
In the pages to follow, we will seek to trace the way in which a focus on human action
provides a key position for observing, analyzing, and theorizing the transformation of the past
into the future, the “given and the new,” “the pre-supposed and the supposed,” and memory
and imagination. Studying human action over time, to use Vladimir Petrovich’s own words,
permits us to “characterize life as a dynamic process that vacillates ‘on the sword’s edge,’
between idea and action, consciousness and activity, experience and implementation, affect
and intelligence.” (2002, p.7).” It is in this process of traversing the sword’s edge alive that the
potential for a freer and less constrained experience may come into being.
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A Brief Digression.
Before embarking on our account of Vladimir Petrovich’s theory of action, seen through
the prism of his major research programs, we want to raise a question that fascinated us as we
undertook this essay. Why, if it seems so clear to us now, wasn’t the centrality of liberatory
action clear to us decades ago when we were translating Vladimir Petrovich’s work and using
many of his ideas? Why did we need to traverse Vladimir Petrovich’s journey with his own
guide book in hand to make this (now) seemingly obvious point?
Clearly, many factors can legitimately be invoked to explain our limited understanding
of Vladimir Petrovich’s ideas. Our own limited scholarly backgrounds make it difficult to follow
the details needed to interpret research in seemingly quite separate, specialized, cultural
domains. The fact that we have always had to deal with subtle issues across two
language/cultural traditions biased our understanding toward ideas that most easily resonated
with those we had become habituated to. These and other factors could be invoked as plausible
contributors to our myopia.
We believe, however, that some of the credit had to go to the ideology-bound, topdown, command and control, organization of Soviet society. We refer here not to our
interactions with Vladimir Petrovich, which went in and out of official favor with those
controlling international science contacts, but to the way that he had to write in order to allow
his subversive world view to accrue new, compelling examples. Equally important is to
understand the converging constraints and affordances that allowed him to conduct
professionally brilliant, socially useful, and approved work at the same time that he could
continue to elaborate on his theory of human action and its broad philosophical and
psychological significance. These “contextual” factors should be kept in mind as we discuss
different manifestations and implications of Vladimir Petrovich’s ideas.
The Common Thread, Human Action
From early in his career, Vladimir Petrovich drew upon the ideas of Nicholas Bernstein;
consequently his use of Bernstein’s ideas is a good starting point for understanding his overall
theory of human action. In the 2002 essay, Vladimir Petrovich takes special note of a central
property of movement identified by Bernstein, namely, the recognition that “exercise is a
repetition without repetition” (2002, p.21). The general point he was making is that when
trying to replicate even the very simplest of movements, identical reproduction is impossible;
consequently, “some space for creativity, for self-development always exists” (ibid.). If we
observe simple movements at a sufficiently fine-grained level, we can always see some
variation; no two finger taps on a keyboard and no two pronunciations of the same phoneme
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are ever completely identical, even if we are trying for identical repetition. This tension
between repetition and creativity, of course, exists in many debates in psychology, and about
human nature in general. On the one hand, to be human is to be socialized into an existing
social order; on the other, to be human is also to construct social and psychological reality in
ways that always leave room for variation. Western analysts have had this debate in
discussions of the merits of Piaget versus Vygotsky, for example. But it played out in special
ways and with especially high stakes in the Soviet Union because of efforts at top-down control
of society.
In this context the work of Vladimir Petrovich and his teachers and colleagues was
controversial for a variety of reasons. For one thing, it was clearly a version of the basic ideas of
cybernetics which Norbert Wiener had developed in the United States, and because of their
origins, Wiener’s ideas were ideologically suspect. The non-linearity of cybernetic systems, and
in particular, the need for creativity in all action, both spoke directly against the idea of
organizing human life by command and control. There has to be, as Vladimir Petrovich knew in
a way that made him a raconteur of anecdotes, some play in the system, for it to remain alive.
An exploration of that necessary creative moment, in many realms of human experience, can
be considered the core of Vladimir Petrovich’s work.
In the pages to follow, we trace Vladimir Petrovich’s work chronologically as a means of
displaying the red thread of continuity. To organize our narrative, we divide it into three
“phases” distinguished by their specific empirical content, the domain of social practice in
which the research was conducted, the theoretical sources being drawn upon, and the political
context.
Phase 1: Perceptual Actions
A key idea about human action, that Vladimir Petrovich inherited from his mentor,
Zaporozhets, is that perception is a form of human action. From this perspective, our eyes
actually “feel” the environment in a manner quite analogous to the ways that one’s hands “feel
for” a handkerchief in our pocket or reach into a shopping cart and picking up objects without
looking, so that we have to “come to” identify the object. One does not pick up a bottle in the
same way that one picks up a banana; any such action is a form of orientation, a process
involving complex back and forth interactions of person and the object. Zaparozhets and
Vladimir Petrovich shared the idea that in this process, a unique mental image is formed as a
kind of “mental model” of the environment and the person’s relations to that environment. The
first series of research carried out by Zaporozhets with Vladimir Petrovich and others of his
generation focused on the development of perceptual action using non-intrusive ways to
record both eye and hand motions in situations that felt and were contrived, but reasonably
natural to the children. This research was then supplemented by Vladimir Petrovich’s work on
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stabilized images. We believe that this latter work is best seen as a continuation of the work
with children, but at an entirely different scale of analysis.
The development of tactile and visual perception
In a series of experiments begun in the late 1950’s, Vladimir Petrovich and his
colleagues presented children with irregularly shaped figures which they were asked to explore.
After a period of exploration, they were then asked to identify the object from an array in
which it was mixed by a variety of other, similar, objects. The children’s movements were
recorded using a high speed movie camera.
A number of interesting results were obtained (see Zaporozhets, 1969, for an accessible
summary; we use only results from the 3 and 6 year olds for purposes of contrast). The
youngest children failed to explore the entire object with their hands and fingers; they were
most likely to prod it or run their hands over the surface; the 6 year olds grasped the edges of
the object and felt along its contours. Subsequently, the 3 year olds were generally
unsuccessful at identifying the object when it was mixed among others while the 6 year olds
experienced no difficulty.
When the children were asked to explore the object visually, a similar pattern of
movements occurred; the 3 year olds focused mostly on the middle of the object with only a
few movements toward its contours while the older children extensively traced the contours as
well as the overall dimensions of the figures with their eyes.
In subsequent studies, the 3 year olds and 6 year olds were distinguishable in a number
of related ways: 3 year olds benefited from engagement of the task in some understandable,
practical task, while the older children could do so in the ordinary isolated environment of the
laboratory task. The 3-year olds could not identify the objects they had explored in one
modality when presented the object in the other modality (e.g., identifying an object felt with
the hands when it was presented visually). How then, does the hand know what the eye saw?
The answer is that the older children have formed an image adequate to the task. When asked
to imagine the object they had been studying previously, the eye movements of both 3 year
olds and the 6 year olds mimicked those they had made earlier.
All well and good. Here we have a clearly recognizable, contemporary approach to
perception and cognition familiar in American cognitive psychology. We also have some
interesting information about the conditions that appear to promote the development of image
making abilities so we can create curricula that optimize the children’s perceptual abilities
(image making being a central constituent of perceptual actions). But what have we learned
about the image making process itself? This is a theoretical approach that wants to get to
process. Environmental design becomes both the means of studying perceptual action and a
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state-sanctioned way of promoting children’s sensory abilities. And these abilities are essential,
the texts tell us, to the development of adults with keen capacities to run the complex
technology that has become the mode of life and was needed, quite urgently, for the well being
of the nation.
Stabilized images on the retina.
Vladimir Petrovich’s work on the phenomenon of stabilized images on the retina
overlapped with his work with children. On the surface the two lines of research might appear
quite distinct. One line is focused on children and the development of sensory capacities (or so
Zaparozhets, 1969, characterized it) while the other focuses on a fascinating and elusive
perceptual phenomenon.
Briefly, the facts are as follows: Our eyes are in constant motion, not only as a result of
voluntary movements of the eyes and the head, but owing to involuntary saccadic eye
movements of 20-200 msecs in duration (and even briefer "micro saccades"). Consequently, the
eyes move with respect to a stationary object even if maximal effort is made to stare at the
object without moving. When visual images are stabilized on the retina using a special
apparatus that moves in perfect coordination with the retina, the visual field goes grey, but it
does so slowly and the images break up before they disappear. If there is slight slippage,
fragments of the image reappear. However, the full image reappears only when there is free
play of the image across the retina. The physiological mechanism for the total fading of the
image is unproblematic: the cells of the retina respond to changes in luminance so they
gradually loose responsivity when luminance is invariant.
Looked at from the perspective of the level of micro-movements, eye movements are
central to visual perception of the world. Consequently, the fact that saccadic eye movements
are required to maintain visual contact with the world places perceptual action right into the
center of the most intimate cognitive capacities of the organism.
These same findings raise a fascinating question: What if it were possible to “trick” the
eye into seeing the object even in the absence of any micro movements? Then movement
would seem superfluous. There would be no need for the eye to “feel” the object.
Vladimir Petrovich, working with creative technical colleagues, did figure out a way to
trick the eye to prolong the image by changing the colors of the images in an appropriate way.
In one study they presented the Necker Cube illusion, a two-dimensional drawing of a three
dimensional object. The cube not only appears as three-dimensional, but successively appears
to protrude from and into the page upon which it is drawn. The subjects reported seeing the
cube reverse its apparent three dimensional orientation even though eye movements were no
longer necessary to maintain the image. Nonetheless, Zinchenko and Vergilis (1972, p. 18)
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observed “vicarious perceptual actions” that “perform the successive perception of different
areas of the stabilized images.” On the basis of this evidence they conclude that “Eye
movements thus organize the movements of attention (vicarious perceptual actions) in the
visual field even if this field is stationary relative to the retina” – ergo perceptual movements
are part of a cognitive system that can operate in a different pattern than the immediately
impinging world. (1972, p. 17). They had arrived at “the mind’s eye” where, in their
terminology, ”the primary function of vicarious perceptual actions with images replace actions
with real objects” (p. 28). The mind’s eye is, again in Vladimir Petrovich’s terms, a “functional
organ,” that includes “vicarious” movements.
VOLODYA-- ZDES otrezil… eto ne idiot zdes—nizhe o Shpet itd.
Each of these conclusions implies that there is a realm of “the psychological,” of
“psychological action,” a process that while in the world and of the world, is not isomorphic to
the world. Using terms proposed by Leontiev, this internal world was conceived of as a process
of simulation, the products of which mediate subsequent action. The process of creating and
implementing that simulation to make it safely into the future constitutes the “sword’s edge.”
Here we find the realm of human consciousness.
Summarizing Phase 1.
When we put the work with children together with the work on stabilized images in
adults we can now see that they indeed bear a clear relation to each other. The work with
children documents a process whereby they are able to form mental images with less and less
environmental support; by the time they are about 7 years old, they imagine an object (a
previously seen odd shape) using the same eye movements they used when seeing that object
previously. The externally evident actions of the initial state are displaced, under normal
circumstances, by a dynamically changing internal model.
The research on stabilized images demonstrates that among adults, even when images
of external objects are perfectly coordinated with the retina, micro-movements of the eyes
occur. Such “vicarious,” movements, vicarious in the sense of being unnecessary in a physical
sense we might think of as the “mental movements” of the mind’s eye.
In both the work on children’s externally recordable movements of the eyes and hands,
and in the stabilized image experiments, this process of image formation involves a complex
back and forth process between organism and environment over time that, like all living
movement, cannot repeat itself exactly. Particularly in its exploratory phase, an image requires
the emergence of something unpredictable, something new, however so slight this newness
may be. The product cannot be totally controlled from the outside. It is, again, however slight,
the margin of free action.
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Also central to each of these accounts is the idea that perceptual action is at the heart
of the relationship between freedom and constraint in human life. As children develop, they
become less “context-bound.” Thought, a millisecond process at its core, separates itself from
externally obvious action. But it remains action, with its momentary balancing on the “sword’s
edge.” This is the moment of image-making, imagination, that is essential to human life. Taken
as a whole, this work is a reminder of how deeply human beings require some “freedom of
movement” to function adequately even to the most reduced environments.
This conclusion seems obvious to us now. But it did not seem obvious to us at the time.
One of the reasons for this was that we came with pre-conceived ideas about the meaning of
technical terms that seemed to play an important role in the thinking of Russian psychologists.
This problem applied, for example, to our interpretation of linkages of perceptual action to the
idea of an orienting reflex made popular through the work of E.N. Sokolov. As we interpreted it,
an orienting reflex is a reaction to a new or unexpected stimulus or to change in the intensity,
duration, frequency, and other parameters of the stimulus. The orienting reflex was famously
used by Luria in his work on semantic reflexes (Luria and Vinogradova, 195?). A basic property
of the orienting reflex is habituation; it disappears with repeated presentation. If a
representation of the stimulus is formed, and subsequent presentations "match" the response
habituates. If there is discordance, the response reappears.
What did this instantaneous “response-to-change” have to do with children feeling
objects over several minutes’ time, trying to figure out what the object might be? Is
instantaneous reaction to discrepancy equivalent to lengthy exploration? Primarily, the link
between the two forms of behavior is that in 1952 Russian psychologists were forced by the
Stalinist regime to adopt Pavlovian language in order to continue working, indeed to survive.
They did so by arriving at the ingenious solution of combing Pavlov’s writing to come up with
concepts that were superficially equivalent to the concepts they had developed in the 1930’s
and 1940’s. Orienting reflex was one such concept because Pavlov himself had referred to this
concept as the “what-is-it” reflex and linked it to exploratory activity.
By the same token, combing the works of Marx and Engels, they chose the concept of
activity (Tätigkeit) as a means of reconciling their own theoretical ideas as psychologists with
the demands of the state for ideological conformity to a regime that sought to provide the
ultimate teleology of every citizen’s life. Here is how Vladimir Petrovich wrote about the
adoption of the concept of activity by psychologists in the 1930’s.1
It is currently understood that the German and Russian words translated as “activity” in English
(Tätigkeit and dejatel'nost') do not correspond. This is but one of the many examples of the problem of
interpreting Russian psychological research for Anglophones to which we referred at the outset of this
essay
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For Rubinshtein and Leontiev the category of activity served as a kind of reservation or
nature preserve, a means for the ideological defense of psychology—to be more
precise, for its survival as a science. … the psyche—and in its wake psychology as well—
found themselves inside the “circle of activity,” which was relatively safe from the
ideological point of view, and it was this that enabled psychology to exist (2004, p. 31).
In this connection, it is quite striking that in neither the work with children published as
late as 1962, nor in the monograph about stabilized images published in 1969 is there any
mention of Vygotsky. Even Zaporozhets, in his summary article published in 1969, only
mentioned Vygotsky briefly, in connection with Leontiev and Galperin, all of whom had spent
time together in Kharkhov where the focus on activity emerged. Given the centrality of
Vygotksy in Vladimir Petrovich’s later writing, we can only attribute his absence as a central
figure to the lingering ban on his works from 1934 to the publication of a small portion of his
writings in 1956. Vladimir Petrovich had encountered the name of Vygotsky both at home and
as a graduate student, but his work was still relatively inaccessible in published form, and it was
still largely off limits when tracing one’s intellectual heritage in print.
Other factors were almost certainly involved. Within psychology, there was an ongoing
struggle over how to interpret Vygotsky’s legacy in which Leontiev and Vladimir Petrovich’s
father both adopted adversarial roles. Nationally, the Thaw was just beginning. Khrushchev
gave his famous speech in 1956 denouncing Stalin and Vladimir Petrovich published his first
article that same year.
With this additional context, we can see Phase 1 as a time when work on a theory of
liberated action was taking place behind, so to speak, layers of screens of different social
languages (as Bakhtin uses that term). The first social language is that of the Soviet State in the
period of late Stalinism and the subsequent thaw, which took time to trickle down in
psychology. Here we encounter the use of Pavlovian language and references to the
philosophical works of Marx and Lenin. The second social language arose in connection with the
domain of social concern such as perceptual/cognitive skill training for young children that
evokes its own social as well as disciplinary discourse focused on processes of developmental
change. Further obscurity is achieved by conducting research working through the high end of
technically sophisticated means for conducting research. All the specialization needed to follow
the arguments in the articles in a subtle manner discouraged deeper analysis. Yet another
screen was created by incorporating strategically useful phrases from “the classics” (political,
philosophical) and use them as a shield against ideological attack, which could extend all the
way to being physically dangerous at the time. Using such social languages as screens is
precisely what Vygotsky had declared he would not do. But he had the good sense to die of
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tuberculosis before he had face retraction or destruction. His heirs were faced with the difficult
circumstances that Vygotsky saw coming.
Phase 2: Ergonomics; The study of Cognition in Complex Man-Machine Systems
We are uncertain as to the circumstances that led to a shift of Vladimir Petrovich’s work from
children and stabilized images to adults, and from schoolrooms to complex work settings
characterized by advanced, “information” technologies: the studies of operators manipulating
joy sticks to control an image on a computer screen. Whatever the reasons for a shift, as we
now see it, this work was a direct extension of the prior studies of children and fixed images.
However, in this new phase in Vladimir Petrovich’s research program was located directly in the
area of what has come to be called the “military-industrial complex” – Soviet style. An article on
perceptual action appeared in “Engineering Psychology” in 1964 when the category of
engineering psychology was just beginning to recover from its ideologically-driven
abandonment in the 1930’s. At the end of the 1960’s ergonomics, the study of man-machine
interactions, became an acceptable discipline; articles growing from Vladimir Petrovich’s
research program, now conducted in close collaboration with his wife, Natasha Gordeeva,
began to appear in Ergonomika and the proceedings of VNIITE (All-Union Scientific and
Research Institute of Industrial Design). The experimental apparatus consisted of a system for
controlling a cursor on a screen using a joystick. The subjects in the experiment had to learn to
track visual objects on the screen that moved along X and Y axes (left-right, up-down), while
changing in size (the third dimension associated with an away/toward motion). This sort of task
is easily recognizable as something a cosmonaut, a train dispatcher, or a fighter pilot might be
required to carry out with great speed and accuracy.
As Natalia Dmitrievna and Vladimir Petrovich (1982) summarized the situation:
The use of a computer in the experiment enables the operator to present on the screen
trajectories of movement varying in complexity, number of elements, and number of
components: he can induce “breakdowns” in the normal course of an action that
require a change in the trajectory of movement; he can cause an inversion, i.e., break
the normal relation between the perceptual and motor fields; and he can vary over a
wide range the transmission ratio between the movement of the control unit and the
spot on the screen, vary the rate of movement of the target along the screen, etc. The
computer enables him to obtain continuous information on the ongoing characteristics
of the time, the precision, and the speed of the subject’s movement (pp. 59-60)
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Although the data obtained from this line of inquiry was even more complex than anything
attempted in earlier phases of Vladimir Petrovich’s research, there can be no doubt of a tight
linkage between the theoretical aspirations involved:
An action is not rehearsed, but constructed. According to N.A. Bernshtein, exercise is a
rehearsal without repetition.2 In other words, in the construction of an action, one can
always observe rivalry or competition between its conservative properties, determined
by already-existing programs and mnemonic schemata, and its dynamic properties,
determined by the novelty of the situation and of the goals and by the sense implicit in
the motor task (p. 51).
Once again, of course, we failed to discern the meaning of a great deal in passages such as this
one before undertaking this essay. And the same set of conditions that misdirected us before
are still very relevant: this appeared to us as primarily applied, engineering psychology.
Moreover, it appeared entirely assimilable into routine “boxology” of the sort that was and
remains popular in American cognitive psychology. We were not the only ones to interpret this
work as standard experimental, cognitive psychology. In a recent volume entitled “Acting with
Technology,” Victor Kaptelinin (himself once a student at Moscow University) and Bonnie Nardi
wrote the following about this line of work:
The functional blocks, as described by Zinchenko, were almost identical to the “boxes”
typical of information processing models of the late 1960’s, such as the model proposed
by Atkinson and Shiffrin (1968). … The work by Zinchenko demonstrated activity theory
and cognitive psychology are not incompatible and that, in principle, cognitive models
can be integrated into activity-theory accounts. (Kaptelinin & Nardi, 2006, p. 184).
A re-reading of this work in the present context indicates how Vladimir Petrovich made it
appear that he was carrying out routine information processing psychology while at the same
time, for those who knew how to read it, pointing to ways in which he was pursuing a markedly
distinct agenda. This contradiction can be seen by comparing a typical “boxological” diagram of
the process of forming an image of a situation and the decidedly non-boxological diagrams that
occurred in the same publications.
-------------------------------------------------------------------Insert two diagrams :1) Gordeeva et al, 1975, 2)from G&Z, 1982
Here we introduce our own repetition without repetition. This encounter with Bernshtein’s idea about
the impossibility of exact replication illustrates precisely the principles involved!!
2
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-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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The spirit of the non-boxological representation of the psychological course of action is
summarized by appealing to how Merleau-Ponty described the work of Matisse recorded on a
slow-motion camera:
The brush, which if one looked at it with the naked eye simply jumped from one place to
another, now that it became visible in slow motion behaved quite differently: it seemed
to think for a time, made dozens of trial movements, danced before the canvas,
sometimes barely touching it, and suddenly, precipitously, like a bolt of lightning,
applied the one line needed.” (Quoted in Gordeeva & Zinchenko, 1982, p. 95).
Of special interest is the comment that “This ‘thinking for a time,’ filled with dozens of fine
movements, in a sense steers in space the one possible future action, filling it with a general
purpose, which confirms our notions of the structure of a meaningful, conscious, object-related
action (ibid, p. 95).
Phase 2. Summarized
This second phase of Vladimir Petrovich’s professional work extended over more than two
decades. In it he, Natalia Dmitrievna, and their graduate students conducted dozens if not
hundreds of experiments that explored the dynamics of perceptual actions as part of various
complex cognitive tasks. To satisfy the practical demands of their work – to increase the
effectiveness of increasingly computer-driven man-machine, they sliced and diced the microstructural dynamics of image formation from the opening moments to its product. In these
conditions, the images studied are no longer discrete objects as in the prior research but
complex action/situation images unfolding at different time scales. This set of experiments
allowed them, in their words, to conclude that
A system of object-related operations unfolding in time leads to the formation of an
integral and momentarily perceived spatial image of the object, i.e., an action is a means
for transforming time into space and space into time. In the latter case, the momentary
spatial image, serving as the regulator of an action, expands into a temporal picture of
the movements entailed (p. 50).
We are back with Bernstein and the idea of living movement.
This is also a period when Vladimir Petrovich, along with his close friend and colleague,
Vassilii Davydov, collaborated on a number of papers on psychological development which led
Vladimir Petrovich naturally back to issues that his father’s generation, now passing, had been
struggling to understand in the fraught conditions of purges, famines, and war. The increasingly
comprehensive scope of his thinking is evidenced in the quotation from Merleau-Ponty, above,
about Matisse painting. This scope constantly brought him up against the strictures of the
Soviet system and he was, in our opinion, a master at providing tiny glimpses of his disgust with
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the system in which he worked, even in the difficult times of “stagnation” of the early 1980’s
and Cold War bluster of the 1980’s. It could be seen, for example, in the way that he and Vasili
Vasilevich snuck references to St. Augustine into their 1982 article in the journal Problems of
Philosophy, the ideological center of Soviet academia. Immediately following an exposition of
Bernstein’s ideas to which we have referred, they demonstrate the ancient, and officially
proscribed, origins of his ideas about time and action:
For instance, Augustine had the following to say: "Expectation refers to the future, and
memory to the past. On the other hand, the tension in an act belongs to the present:
through it the future is transformed into the past. Hence, an act may contain something
that refers to what has not yet come to pass." (Zinchenko & Davydov, 1982, p. 30).
This same article contains pointed examples from Bulgakov, Rilke, and Norbert Wiener, each
ideologically suspect, each pointing away from the idea that top-down command and control of
human activity can fully control the fundamental human need to be creative. and to engage in
what, at about the same time, he began to refer to as liberated action. (Zinchenko, 1985)
Phases 3 and 4
To simplify our story in light of the constraints set by both acceptable page length and
the limitations of our current knowledge, we will discuss phases three and four together. This
sequence appears to map well onto Vladimir Petrovich’s recent description of his career in the
following terms.
My own development as a psychologist can be seen as an inversion of the history of the
Soviet psychology: first there was the Cultural-Historical Approach; later – the
Psychological Theory of Activity. I started with the latter and am slowly approaching the
former now. From my earlier research on sensory-motor skills and perceptual actions I
had moved to studies of the development of visual image, visual thinking and visual
memory; finally, through my fairly late interest in poetry and psychology of art, I have
turned my attention to the Word and Culture - at last. (in press, p. 1)
In the terms we have been using thus far, Phase three is signaled by the entry of Vygotsky into
Vladimir Petrovich’s published writing. For Vladimir Petrovich, this intellectual change coincided
with both the changing intellectual climate (Vygotsky once again became ideologically
acceptable after more than 20 years of erasure) and new institutional relationships (Vladimir
Petrovich was excluded from the inner circle of power brokers in Soviet psychology, the same
exclusion that made his involvement in ergonomics both possible and necessary). Vygotsky is
16
not clearly visible in the mid-1970’s when Vladimir Petrovich wrote about visual culture and
creative action for a Soviet audience (Zinchenko, 1973). But Vygotsky was there front and
center in Vladimir Petrovich’s 1980 essay on Vygotsky and units of analysis.
In this connection, it seems important to us to remember that Vladimir Petrovich is one of a
generation of psychologists whose fathers were key players in the original Vygotsky-LuriaLeontiev collaborations. The central group of Vygotsky’s followers went on to form the Kharkov
school of psychology , and, following Leontiev, became the part of the generation of activity
theorists along with Sergei Rubeinshtein. It seems essential to use to note that he did not
jettison Leontiev when incorporating Vygotsky. Rather he, in his own way, sought to reconcile
the division that had grown up in his parents’ lives in the 1930’s and 1940’s.”
The cardinal event that marks the Phase 3- Phase 4 transition was the end of Soviet
Power in 1991. It is important to recall that several years prior to the demise of the USSR there
was a period of radical reforms during which Soviet and American scholars were allowed to
interact with each other more extensively. And to interact more extensively, when there is
vodka in the room, means to communicate more freely. It is at this point that we see a
transition that is signaled by Vladmir Petrovich’s use of capital letters when writing about the
Word and Culture. The transition from word to Word and culture to Culture coincides with the
term “spirituality” entering into Vladimir Petrovich’s writing. He defines spirituality as “the
immaterial aspects of reality” (Zinchenko, 2002, p. 17). As he writes about it now, Activity
Theory has become too heavy for him, too focused on production of material goods to think
about the ideal, the imagined, the freer production of meaning. Activity theory remains
valuable in some circumstances (we do want astronaughts to return safely from the moon and
our local warriors to come home uninjured from the war). But it does not speak to the quality
of life or to that “investment of meaning” that lies at the heart of spirituality.
We obviously cannot hope to compress all of this more recent, very diverse, work into a
coherent discussion. Consequently, in the remaining pages we recount two directions our own
ideas have taken us in our own attempts to deal with the same issues that have been
preoccupying Vladimir Petrovich. We believe there is a great deal in common in our thinking,
although we are aware that we write in a kind of “polyglossic” language – Vygotsky and Russian
Culture mixed with American pragmatism and its preoccupation with cultures. Each set of ideas
focuses, in its own way, on the concept of mediation, central to our thinking, as well as to
Vladimir Petrovich’s.
The first example takes up a different aspect of the lessons about images and mediation
one can learn from experiments involving fixed images, based on the stabilized image methods
worked out by Vladimir Petrovich and Vergilis. The second focuses on narrative as a form of
17
mediation. Both are relevant to his central concern with the “non-material aspects of reality” as
a realm of human freedom.
Stabilized Images: Focusing on the Fragmentation Process.
We have already encountered Vladimir Petrovich’s use of stabilized image methods to
understand perceptual action. His research revealed that even when no motion of the eye can
influence the spatial relation of the eye of the object before it, the eye continues to move, as if
the mind’s eye were continuing to examine different parts of the object’s replacement, an
image. Even under conditions of maximal constraint, this phenomenon indicates the possibility
not only of freedom from the world, but freedom within it.
American research on stabilized images being conducted at about the same time
focused not on the perceptual actions that occurred during stabilization, but the fragmentation
of the image during the process of stabilization or following a period of total stabilization as
freedom of eye movement is regained.
Recall that in a stabilized image experiment, visual images are projected and stabilized
on the retina using a special apparatus designed to move in perfect coordination with the
retina. When a perfect alignment between saccadic eye movements and the projected image is
achieved, the visual field goes gray. It fades into gray slowly and as it does so, the images break
up before they disappear. If there is then a slight slippage in the apparatus, such that eye
movements break free of their coordination with the projected image, fragments of the image
reappear. The full image, however, reappears only when there is a free play of light from the
world across the retina.
The physiological mechanism that explains the phenomenon of total fading of the image
is unproblematic: the cells of the retina respond to changes and differences in luminance. These
cells lose responsivity (“bleach out”) when luminance is invariant (e.g., when there is perfect
coordination). (Pritchard 1971; Inhoff and Topolski 1994). Other research has shown that all the
effective information is obtained during the moments when the eye is fixed on its target; no
useful visual information is obtained during the saccadic eye movements. (Matin et al. 1970). In
addition, the passage of time between the fixations ensures that when we fixate on an object
we necessarily see it from a different angle, and on a different physical and physiological
background than in the moment previous to that fixation. It seems that the flow of information
from the world is discontinuous, and necessarily so. Yet despite the presence of objective
physical discontinuity we experience the world as a continuous. How is this possible?
In seeking to understand this process, American researchers directed our attention to
the finding that the manner in which image fragments disappear or appear is not entirely
18
random; it is not the case that arbitrary bits of the image fade, as though a lense were losing
focus. Instead the ways in which an image fragments or reappears depends on the kind of
stimulus presented to the retina in the experiment. Two classes of image-stimuli are important
to the following discussion. The first are those heavily constrained by human phylogeny (e.g.,
the detection and recognition of faces); the second class of image-stimuli arise from
accumulated constraints embodied in culture (e.g., the graphic letters in an alphabet).
The difference between these two kinds of stimuli is illustrated by the images in Figure 1
(Pritchard 1971). In each row of the figure, the left-most image is the one stabilized with
respect to the retina, while the images to the right are the images that subjects report seeing as
the initial image dissappears or reappears.
Essential to interpreting the figure is the fact that the “HB” monogram and the female
profile share basic, biologically constrained, properties such as the sharp changes of luminance
at the borders between black and white. Differential responsivity at points of high luminance
variations is present at birth (Bronson 1990). Newborns fixate upon the hairline or other lines
that provide high contrast with their background. In Vygotskian terms, we interpreted the
fragments into which the woman’s profile breaks up are predominantly natural, phylogenetic
objects. What appears to be innate recognition of the mother’s face turns out to be recognition
of a pattern of luminance. The one specifically cultural element in the fragments (the hair band)
is secondary.
Precisely the opposite is true of the
HB monogram which is a quientessential
cultural object, the meaning of which
depends upon knowledge of an alphabet.
Differential luminance is of course present,
but in every case the way the constituents
of the HB monogram disintegrate and
reappear are all reported as written
Figure 1. The shapes into which the profile of a female
head and the monogram, HB disintegrate when they are
alphanumeric symbols, not points of
fixed with respect to the movement of the retina
highest luminescence contrast. (See the
(adapted from Pritchard 1971).
bottom line of Figure 1). This response
pattern cannot be attributed to
phylogenetic history. Rather, each of the fragments is organized as meaningful cultural unit (to
literate persons).
To explain the fragmentation patterns of the HB monogram, Pritchard, following Hebb
(1949), suggested that, as a result of the massive experience of using graphic symbols, the
human brain has formed “cell assemblies,” what currently might be termed “cortical firmware,”
to facilitate the maintenance and activation of their internal organization.
Following this interpretation of research on the components of the visual image we can
conclude that one component is highly specified by factors arising from the phylogenetic
19
development of human beings. A second component conforms to individuals’ culturally
organized experience. However, the two sources (or conditions) of experience are not sufficient
to give a coherent image of the object before one’s eyes. A third component is required - the
active reconciliation by human beings who must make sense of different sources of experience
in real time (Pelaprat & Cole, 2011). This active reconciliation of information arising at two
slightly different points in time is made necessary by the operation of saccadic eye movements.
This “resolving activity” is necessary for a whole image of the world to arise, and for thought
and action to be possible. Hence what is referred to as an image is constituted of three parts: 1)
a set of biological constraints stemming from human phylogenetic development; 2) a set of
cultural constraints and its historical-social development; 3) the individual, resolution of the
discrepancy between these two sources of constraint, that, moment-to-moment, produces an
image.
The third constituent is what Vladimir Petrovich was focused on in his earlier work. His
boxological functional blocks appear to dissect that process for producing an image into
seemingly discrete, measurable, parts that, taken as a whole, constitute perceptual actions.
However, as Vladimir Petrovich knew full well, no matter how many boxes one divides the flow
of living movement into, there will always be a residual element, a process “between the
boxes,” represented only by a slim, black, line in depictions of the model, where the outcome is
not pre-determined. Here is the domain of imagination, the always-present “spiritual” side of
human cognition.
We can leave this topic with greater appreciation for three issues. Firstly, a process of
image making, literally, into image-making in Russian (voobrazhenie), occures even when the
object of our imagination is present to our senses; imagination is not (only) thought about
something absent. Second, and relatedly, it seems necessary for human cognition that
individuals constantly engage in a process of image formation. Image formation is the
“connecting bridge” between two states of experience: one given by phylogenetic history of the
human species, the other given by the cultural-historical environment and prior individual
experience. What this bridging process entails -- and what the results of the fixed image
experiment indicate -- is that human beings are by nature always engaged in a process of
image-formation situated between nature and culture. Third, the existence of culturally
mediated, historically sedimented constraints, provides an additional layer of “the given” to
human beings’ toolkit for dealing with the new. It provides more degrees of freedom with
which to deal with the ongoing process of life. Culture and freedom are very deeply rooted in
human psychology.
Bakhtin, Shpet, and Mediated Action
Another major domain of Vladimir Petrovich’s developing ideas about the cultural
mediation of human mental life draws heavily on the work of Mikhail Mikhailovitch Bakhtin and
20
Gustav Gustavovich Shpet. This work illustrates how he incorporated many of Vygotsky’s ideas
into his thinking, and how at certain points he goes beyond Vygotsky to place heavier emphasis
on the cultural/spiritual side of the razor’s edge, the urge toward new, imagined, futures.
Import in this regard are Vladimir Petrovich’s invocation of the “inner form of the word” as
outlined by Shpet, who was one of Vygotsky’s teachers who had developed his own account of
inner speech (Zinchenko and Wertsch, 2009) as well as Bakthin’s use of the utterance as a basic
unit of analysis. At first glance these ideas seem far removed from ergonomics or the
psychophysiology of perceptual action. For example, in “The Problem of the Text in Linguistics,
Philology, and the Human Sciences: An Experiment in Philosophical Analysis” Bakhtin examined
the utterance or text as his basic unit of analysis in human communication and outlined an
approach that recognizes the inherently unique dimension of language use:
[B]ehind each text stands a language system. Everything in the text that is repeated and
reproduced, everything repeatable and reproducible, everything that can be given
outside a given text (the given) conforms to this language system. But at the same time
each text (as an utterance) is individual, unique, and unrepeatable, and herein lies its
entire significance (its plan, the purpose for which it was created). This is the aspect of
it that pertains to honesty, truth, goodness, beauty, history. (ibid.)
Bakhtin’s claims about these “two poles of the text” (1986, p.105) echo of Bernshtein’s idea of
“repetition without repetition” and Bakhtin’s own formulation of a “repeatable and
unrepeatable moments of the utterance.”
Using this more culturalist emphasis, Vladimir Petrovich managed to create a host of
insights into free action and functional organs, those concepts of the long ago. Of particular
interest in this connection is how he characterizes functional organs in terms of their
“biodynamic sensuous affective ‘tissue’” (2002, p.8), an observation that points to a more
dynamic, organically-oriented picture of psychological functioning in contrast to a mechanistic
or deterministic one often favored in “boxology.”
These ideas come across especially clearly in Vladimir Petrovich’s account of mediation,
which “constitutes the very core of cultural-historical psychology” (2002, p.9). He credits
Vygotsky, whose intellectual heritage comes through clearly on this issue. In certain respects
the notion of mediation played a more central and telling role in Vygotsky’s writings than it
does for Vladimir Petrovich, while at the same time, there are certain ways in which Vladimir
Petrovich goes beyond what Vygotsky had to offer on this topic.
For example, Vygotsky focused on the emergence of mediation in history and
ontogenesis as a crucial factor that separates humans from other species and higher from
elementary mental functioning. It is for this reason that he emphasized the qualitative
transformation involved with the incorporation of tools and signs into human action:
21
By being included in the process of behavior, the psychological tool [i.e., sign]
alters the entire flow and structure of mental functions. It does this by determining the
structure of a new instrumental act just as a technical tool alters the process of a natural
adaptation by determining the form of labor operations (Vygotsky, 1930/1981, p.137).
In contrast, Vladimir Petrovich questions the assumption of a “natural” line of
development for elementary mental functions that exists independently of language and can
hence be transformed by the encounter with speech. Drawing on recent studies of infant
development, he argues that even at the earliest stages of life “the infant is far from being
indifferent to the language atmosphere that surrounds it.” (in press, p.6). His ideas concerning
the always-cultural nature of the human environment come not only from current research on
infant development but from sources as diverse as the Russian Orthodox theologians Pavel
Florensky concerning culture and Nikolai Berdyaev concerning creativity and freedom. Most
importantly, they are grounded in an integrative view of human mental life suggested by the
notion of a functional organ, originating in the work of A.A. Ukhtomsky, a prominent
physiologist in the 1920s. Instead of positing a dialectic of strictly opposing forces, Vladimir
Petrovich sees a “certain similarity in architectonics of the word, action and image” (in press,
p.4). According to this view, in line with the emphasis on spirituality, diversity, quasi-organized
social life, not a monolithic, fundamentalist vision, is what a consciousness, oriented to the
future, should treasure.
Concluding Comments
We hope that our story have proved useful to the reader in thinking more deeply about
the lessons to be learned from Vladimir Zinchenko’s life work. We can testify personally that
we, at least have been the beneficiaries of our re-reading of Vladimir Petrovich’s amazing reach
as a humanist scholar.
In short, we believe our story goes like this:
The freedom allowed by Perestroika and then the disintegration of the USSR, coupled
with many years of experience, including the research we have briefly described above, brought
Vladimir Petrovich to a richer understanding of the implication of cultural mediation in human
life. In his late work he makes it clear that no top-down, received wisdom from the state about
human progress cannot prevail in the long run, although it can crush people for lifetimes.
However bitter the circumstances, so long as there is a gap between power and the individual,
culture serves as the arena of human freedom and a tool for collective action. “Culture is alive
as long as it can question itself; otherwise it becomes stagnant and dies” (in press, p.1).
But culture is not indestructible. It was built by human beings and it has been torn down
by human beings. What is required, if we have interpreted Vladimir Petrovich’s current thinking
22
correctly (to use American terminology) is the maintenance of cultural diversity as a condition
of avoiding fossilized notions of a virtuous future.
In closing we wish to join Vladimir Petrovich in urging upon scholars the necessity of
dialogue as a condition of self-examination, of reflexivity. We fully agree that this injunctiton
“applies to Cultural-Historical psychology as well” (ibid.). This essay is such an exercise – a self
examination of our limited understandings of the fundamental ideas of Russian psychology
through the medium of Vladimir Petrovich. We have, as Barthes urged upon us, re-read.
Hopefully we have produced a story that can be re-imagined by future generations of
psychologists.
23
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